SPLICED Magazine Issue 02 Dec/Jan 2014 | Page 98

All images © DC Comics and their respective artists.

Flashpoint / The Speed
Force, Exploding Heads and
'Subject 1'

The day the world mourned a
Superhero. The death of Superman
made worldwide news, the first
time a major leading character had
been killed in a comic.

You know how DC has this habit of reinventing
themselves? They totally did it again... This change,
though, more than any other affected the very
notion of comics and superheroes. A pre-cursor to
the launch of the famed New 52, Flashpoint took
every idea that you ever had about the DC universe
and blew it up in gloriously-rendered explosions.
The story follows The Flash in his sudden
discovery that he no longer has his superpowers
and is in a war-ravaged landscape that sees London
as a flooded pile of ruins and millions of people
dead. Fragmented memories convince him that
he's not just imagining things, that he was/is a
superhero in spite of his friends' and colleagues'
questioning of his strange behaviour. Behind the
scenes, Cyborg is trying to organise a group of
rebel heroes (including a drunken, gun-toting killer
Batman) to face off against the tyrannical and
warring factions of Aquaman and Wonder Woman.
As the story escalates, we witness the
appearance of Subject 1, an emaciated and
mentally unstable Superman, far more powerful
than the version that the Flash remembers. It's
eventually revealed that everything was a plot by
the Flash's enemy Professor Zoom, who altered
the Flash's past and subsequently changed several
events in the future (it's complicated and LOTS
of characters die, okay?). Things do get fixed, but
certain convenient changes portended the altering
of DC's character roster's origins.